Q. There have been so many catastrophes of all types lately w/extensive media coverage, almost to the point of a frenzy. How can i deal with this? Can i use it for awakening in some way?
G. The ability of our current technology to capture every detail, immediately, of every major event, world-wide, and feed it continuously to our devices and social media, can be a transfixing, hypnotizing and emotionally-disruptive phenomena.
This media fixation on an event often persists for days, until the next calamity, and the last one becomes "over". The "media" is capable of, and driven to, whip this into such a frenzy that every conversation becomes "Did you hear...?", in an almost competitive way to see who is "most current". This can drive us into despair, existential crisis, excitement, angst, anger, worry, fear, depression, etc.
Is there a way to not get caught in this ongoing media-fueled 24/7/365 frenzy?
Rich Doyle and i, in our ongoing series of Dialogues on Awakening Beyond Thought, explored those questions in a recent video "Getting to 'stillness' in a crisis w/a media fast". Here is that (redacted) dialogue:
Rich: Everything is just as it is and therefore perfect; even the organizations that we find ourselves working in, despite all appearances, are perfection, too.
G: Perfectly imperfect.
R. Exactly. Could we talk about the migration of this practice of cultivating an awareness of Source, dwindling the self-referential thoughts from narrative mind, to the larger collective of which we are a part?
G. We are Darwinianly evolved to participate in large organizations. we are the most social animal on the planet; no others do the kind of complex organizational "stuff" that we do. we have even developed a large frontal/prefrontal cortex dedicated to social issues and functioning "inter-personally".
Given that we are going to be in those structures, can we somehow bring a different way of operating to them, however we organize them? Whether it is your baseball team or your political party, can you bring some real creativity and intelligence to that discussion?
i find a good way to do that is by getting into Presence as in Peter Senge's work @ MIT, (who i've spent a lot of time with) where you focus on getting to "don't know". You recognize that nobody has the answer. In contradistinction to what we normally see, believing that this party or that party, this company or that company, etc., has the answer, we recognize that we really don't know the answer.
Can we solve these problems from a space of not knowing and let something organic evolve out of that which is totally different?
R. Getting to not knowing also involves a different relationship to our emotions. When some news event happens and something terrible occurs, there is very little of just "being with" how terrible the event is.
Just feel the nature of that event instead of immediately going into the narrative mind and "What are we going to do about it?" or "How could that happen?". Actually just being with it. Don't try to even explain it. Not helpful. There's a feeling associated with that. At first for most people, it feels very bad, even a little bit sickening.
But to me, in my days of psychedelic exploration, that was the beginning of the feeling process. There can be a difficult period that you have to ride through, and let go of, and it feels like if you can be with that feeling, and say "OK, yes" and be with the trauma and tragedy of what occurs, on the other side of that is another feeling which is qualitatively distinct.
Then you can really be with it and you can feel compassion for what's going on. Then you "don't know"; you don't have an immediate "OK, make that so, make that so." What would come out of that politically would be much more interesting.
G. i have no experience with psychedelics, so i can't speak to that, but i think you're "on point" that when you see something awful happen, whether it's "man-made" or "nature-made", and you run off into "I must do something", you can feel the difference, the shift in your energy. Just be present as you move from wherever you were before the event and ask "Why did i leave this space?". Feel this new space and the energy of "This is horrific! i must do something! i must understand this thing."
In the new space, with the media feeding it, throwing gasoline on the fire, you can just pull yourself out of that. you did a media fast for quite a while, which i felt was very salutary. you pulled back and said "What if i weren't listening to media? What if i just took the event, saw what i saw, and then let go, and didn't spend hours and days in a frenzy with the media-fed craziness and just got out of it?"
R. Imagine if people spent even a tenth of the time in Source, in Presence, in the space of "no thought," of "not knowing", as they do in the media feedback frenzy about "What are we going to do about this now?". The effects of that alone would be quite salutary.
I found a media fast to be an absolutely fundamental part of my path. i was constantly getting my chain yanked by people marketing the idea that "the world is broken". Each day featured a different aspect of the way in which the world is broken which gave an unending focus for attention; that's how they make a living and that's fine.
But we are capable of directing our attention, not just towards the content of the narrative mind and "What are we going to do about this?", but also towards the way we are in any given moment. In that sense, these horrible traumatic events are reminders, pointers, to stay in that present moment and really feel.
Because not only are we not feeling the present moment when we have that immediate response, we're not feeling the emergence of the first violets, the look on someone's face when you pass them on the street, or the sound of a bird singing. we're not being with any of it.
G. Perhaps a response might be inculcated so the next time you see a traumatic event, just give yourself the gift of a one-day media fast. When all of the media is on just that one thing, just stop, and don't watch any media that day, and see how you feel, how different the content of your consciousness is. That contrast can also lead you to grasp what "stillness" can be like compared to your normal day.
R. Yes, do that "OK, i'm going to do one day" and see how it works. Do three days, a week, two weeks, a month. What's really interesting is that the narrative mind will say "You need to know what's going on! This is totally irresponsible!" What's really interesting is that you know "absolutely everything" that you need to know about what's going on. You're not insulated from it on an informational basis. What you're insulated from is the emotional frenzy of the "for/against", "this/that", constant "chain yank" but you do know everything you need to know.
G. That was a great lesson that i learned that was forced upon me. i was in nuclear submarines for five years and we were out, underwater, for months at a time, with no communications for anything like this.
i found that everything that i needed to know, i knew, and everything was just fine in my busy, complex world. When i came back up, folk said "Did you know that this, and this, happened???" and i said "OK" and i was up to date. Bobby Kennedy was killed and i was underwater for that. i was underwater for MLK's assassination; i didn't know anything about it. So, i missed the frenzy around those things, but i got the information when i got back; it didn't matter to the world that i wasn't in touch w/them for three months at a time. It was really a great lesson for me; my own media fast imposed on me.
R. It's brilliant. The analogy that comes to mind is a soap opera. A daytime drama that you don't watch for 3 years and then you tune back in and there's been some plastic surgery, but absolutely nothing has changed. Right? Yes, there's been some different person come out of coma, a different person gone into coma... That sense can be very liberating when you can see that it didn't matter at all to Robert Kennedy or Martin Luther King or their families that you didn't witness their murders at a distance.
G. Yes, that's right.
 |
| Boston Marathon Explosion |
G. The ability of our current technology to capture every detail, immediately, of every major event, world-wide, and feed it continuously to our devices and social media, can be a transfixing, hypnotizing and emotionally-disruptive phenomena.
This media fixation on an event often persists for days, until the next calamity, and the last one becomes "over". The "media" is capable of, and driven to, whip this into such a frenzy that every conversation becomes "Did you hear...?", in an almost competitive way to see who is "most current". This can drive us into despair, existential crisis, excitement, angst, anger, worry, fear, depression, etc.
Is there a way to not get caught in this ongoing media-fueled 24/7/365 frenzy?
Rich Doyle and i, in our ongoing series of Dialogues on Awakening Beyond Thought, explored those questions in a recent video "Getting to 'stillness' in a crisis w/a media fast". Here is that (redacted) dialogue:
Rich: Everything is just as it is and therefore perfect; even the organizations that we find ourselves working in, despite all appearances, are perfection, too.
G: Perfectly imperfect.
R. Exactly. Could we talk about the migration of this practice of cultivating an awareness of Source, dwindling the self-referential thoughts from narrative mind, to the larger collective of which we are a part?
G. We are Darwinianly evolved to participate in large organizations. we are the most social animal on the planet; no others do the kind of complex organizational "stuff" that we do. we have even developed a large frontal/prefrontal cortex dedicated to social issues and functioning "inter-personally".
Given that we are going to be in those structures, can we somehow bring a different way of operating to them, however we organize them? Whether it is your baseball team or your political party, can you bring some real creativity and intelligence to that discussion?
 |
| Peter Senge MIT |
Can we solve these problems from a space of not knowing and let something organic evolve out of that which is totally different?
R. Getting to not knowing also involves a different relationship to our emotions. When some news event happens and something terrible occurs, there is very little of just "being with" how terrible the event is.
Just feel the nature of that event instead of immediately going into the narrative mind and "What are we going to do about it?" or "How could that happen?". Actually just being with it. Don't try to even explain it. Not helpful. There's a feeling associated with that. At first for most people, it feels very bad, even a little bit sickening.
But to me, in my days of psychedelic exploration, that was the beginning of the feeling process. There can be a difficult period that you have to ride through, and let go of, and it feels like if you can be with that feeling, and say "OK, yes" and be with the trauma and tragedy of what occurs, on the other side of that is another feeling which is qualitatively distinct.
Then you can really be with it and you can feel compassion for what's going on. Then you "don't know"; you don't have an immediate "OK, make that so, make that so." What would come out of that politically would be much more interesting.
G. i have no experience with psychedelics, so i can't speak to that, but i think you're "on point" that when you see something awful happen, whether it's "man-made" or "nature-made", and you run off into "I must do something", you can feel the difference, the shift in your energy. Just be present as you move from wherever you were before the event and ask "Why did i leave this space?". Feel this new space and the energy of "This is horrific! i must do something! i must understand this thing."
In the new space, with the media feeding it, throwing gasoline on the fire, you can just pull yourself out of that. you did a media fast for quite a while, which i felt was very salutary. you pulled back and said "What if i weren't listening to media? What if i just took the event, saw what i saw, and then let go, and didn't spend hours and days in a frenzy with the media-fed craziness and just got out of it?"
R. Imagine if people spent even a tenth of the time in Source, in Presence, in the space of "no thought," of "not knowing", as they do in the media feedback frenzy about "What are we going to do about this now?". The effects of that alone would be quite salutary.
I found a media fast to be an absolutely fundamental part of my path. i was constantly getting my chain yanked by people marketing the idea that "the world is broken". Each day featured a different aspect of the way in which the world is broken which gave an unending focus for attention; that's how they make a living and that's fine.
But we are capable of directing our attention, not just towards the content of the narrative mind and "What are we going to do about this?", but also towards the way we are in any given moment. In that sense, these horrible traumatic events are reminders, pointers, to stay in that present moment and really feel.
Because not only are we not feeling the present moment when we have that immediate response, we're not feeling the emergence of the first violets, the look on someone's face when you pass them on the street, or the sound of a bird singing. we're not being with any of it.
G. Perhaps a response might be inculcated so the next time you see a traumatic event, just give yourself the gift of a one-day media fast. When all of the media is on just that one thing, just stop, and don't watch any media that day, and see how you feel, how different the content of your consciousness is. That contrast can also lead you to grasp what "stillness" can be like compared to your normal day.
R. Yes, do that "OK, i'm going to do one day" and see how it works. Do three days, a week, two weeks, a month. What's really interesting is that the narrative mind will say "You need to know what's going on! This is totally irresponsible!" What's really interesting is that you know "absolutely everything" that you need to know about what's going on. You're not insulated from it on an informational basis. What you're insulated from is the emotional frenzy of the "for/against", "this/that", constant "chain yank" but you do know everything you need to know.
 |
| Nuclear submarine submerging typically for months |
G. That was a great lesson that i learned that was forced upon me. i was in nuclear submarines for five years and we were out, underwater, for months at a time, with no communications for anything like this.
i found that everything that i needed to know, i knew, and everything was just fine in my busy, complex world. When i came back up, folk said "Did you know that this, and this, happened???" and i said "OK" and i was up to date. Bobby Kennedy was killed and i was underwater for that. i was underwater for MLK's assassination; i didn't know anything about it. So, i missed the frenzy around those things, but i got the information when i got back; it didn't matter to the world that i wasn't in touch w/them for three months at a time. It was really a great lesson for me; my own media fast imposed on me.
 |
| Assassination of Robert Kennedy |
R. It's brilliant. The analogy that comes to mind is a soap opera. A daytime drama that you don't watch for 3 years and then you tune back in and there's been some plastic surgery, but absolutely nothing has changed. Right? Yes, there's been some different person come out of coma, a different person gone into coma... That sense can be very liberating when you can see that it didn't matter at all to Robert Kennedy or Martin Luther King or their families that you didn't witness their murders at a distance.
G. Yes, that's right.
I stopped looking at the news somtime ago for quite similar reasons. It's funny how we all follow similar paths.
ReplyDeleteWhat if I dont listen to media? My grandparents never had a TV for the first half of their lifes and everything was right. Some people today is starting to throw away their TVs! :)
If you're not going to do something about what happens in the other side of the earth, then you dont need to know about it...
And even if you're very compassionate you can only help a few... what use is to see every evening all the sorrow of the universe?
Yes, folk seem to believe that is "compassionate" at some level if i know all about every calamity that is happening all over the world on a minute-to-minute basis. That is not my experience.
ReplyDeleteIf i am focused on what's happening half a world away, 7/24, how can i be present to be right here, right now, where i find myself, where i can make a difference?